


Checkmate

by KanuKoris



Series: The Bishop DeSoto, Long May He Reign [9]
Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Bishop Max, Board Ending, Darkest Timeline, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Political Revolution, this is the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22231291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KanuKoris/pseuds/KanuKoris
Summary: Captain Hawthorne leads the revolution. The Bishop is looking to end it. Neither will stop until they've won... or lost.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Series: The Bishop DeSoto, Long May He Reign [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567744
Comments: 35
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

“Bishop. We will be landing shortly.”

Bishop DeSoto nodded and pushed away from the tactical holo-map that was projecting on his command console. “Ready my armor.”

He was on the bridge of an OSI troop transport. The Board had activated their armed forces, a conscription protocol had been enacted in each of the settlements, and the Church of the Scientific Order had pledged their support. The Scientician Guard and volunteers among the priesthood readied themselves for the assault on Monarch, and as their spiritual leader, the Bishop had assumed their command.

After Hawthorne escaped her execution, she had fled to Monarch and the Board had uncovered the true layers to her conspiracy on Byzantium. The Adjutant had been beside herself in their emergency sessions.

“She was after the accounts the whole fucking time.” Adjutant Akande was still the most composed person in the room, but to her standards she was being almost hysterical. “Now there’s nothing holding Nandi back. MSI’s just gained complete independence from the Board.”

What the Bishop had learned in those sessions was that when the MSI was granted their request to act as their own corporate entity, the Halcyon Holdings Corporation had processed their exit so that they still maintained control of MSI’s holding account. A fancy way to say that even though MSI worked hard to earn their bits, ultimately the Board controlled their purse strings.

Hawthorne had found the account and rewritten its permissions. She had locked the Board out.

And along the way she had somehow rallied the Iconoclasts, SubLight Salvaging, and every settlement on Monarch and the Groundbreaker to her side. Zora Blackwood had sent recorded messages to Terra-2 announcing that Monarch was a free colony and that anyone who wished to live outside of the Halcyon Holdings Corporation could join them.

The Bishop didn’t realize how quickly a war could start, but they were swiftly plunging into times of violence and bloodshed. The OSI ship began its descent into Stellar Bay, and he loaded ammunition into his shotgun.

He was leading the ground assault against MSI headquarters. And he was raring for a fight.

***

“Push! Push forward!”

The Bishop roared over the din of gunfire, waving his arm forward for his shock troops to charge the barricade in front of MSI headquarters. The Board had picked up chatter that Sanjar Nandi was still stationed in Stellar Bay, and the quickest way to end a revolution was to round up the figureheads and ‘behead’ them, so to speak.

Scientician soldier had clashed with Iconoclast revolutionary, the fighting choking the streets of Stellar Bay.

With a grunt, the Bishop fired his shotgun point-blank into the chest of an Iconoclast and then clubbed them over the head. He had run out of shells and he tossed the gun aside.

His guard breached the outer doors and charged into the lobby.

Captain Hawthorne stood there, hefting a shock cannon in both hands, and when she saw the Bishop run in, a dark grin lit on her face.

The Bishop grabbed a pulse hammer from the Scientician guard standing next to him, and then charged forward. He swung the hammerhead behind him and brought it whistling forward to crash into the Captain’s skull.

The shock cannon charged in her hands and a crackling beam of energy shot forth, singing his armor and sending guards around him screaming to their knees.

The pulse hammer missed its target, though it collided onto the floor and sent out a shockwave of force that knocked the Captain’s cannon out of the way. She tossed it aside and leapt toward him, a plasma cutter in hand arcing towards his face.

The Bishop rolled away at the last second and felt the plasma cutter slice into his side. The sizzling blade stabbed towards him again, and again. He laughed, dark and manic, as he grappled with the Captain. He did not feel the pain in his side, his skin crackled and his vision had tunneled to Hawthorne. He had never felt so fucking alive than when he was fighting for his life.

She kicked him in the side of the head to buy herself some distance from him, but with a grunt and shake, he remained standing. Focused. Obsessed. He picked up his hammer off the ground and bellowed at her.

“Hawthorne!”

The hammer swung, and she had to dance away from its sizzling blow.

“You’ve just delayed the inevitable!” He taunted, swinging the hammer again. “If you wanted me to execute you personally, you should have just asked!”

The hammer came down and she dodged just in time, but it crashed into a marble column that shattered. A heavy chunk fell and rolled off her leg. The Bishop heard the ‘crack!’ saw the stricken flash of pain on her face, and noted the slight hobble as she backed away from him. A demonic grin lit on his face.

He had her now.

“No, Maximillian,” she called out, trying to sound cocky over the pain. “We both know there’s no fun in that!”

Suddenly, she pulled a pistol from the back of her belt, brought it forward and fired it at him. He only had a moment to scoff that this pea-shooter wouldn’t be able to stop him, but a rushing wave of force suddenly bowled into him and knocked him off of his feet. He was sent flying across the lobby and took a hard landing on the floor.

He groaned. Hawthorne must have held onto one of Welles’ experimental weapons. He rose to his feet and was about to lunge toward her, but in the blink of an eye she had disappeared from right in front of him. She was racing out the doors, moving faster than humanly possible, as if she had jumped forward in time.

The Bishop ran out, trying to catch up with the Captain, to discover she had baited him and he had walked right into her trap.

His transport ships were burning. Set on fire while the OSI ranks had tried to capture Stellar Bay. They had been goaded into an ambush and been outmaneuvered. It would take all of their remaining troops to regroup just to survive long enough for extraction, now that their retreat was cut off.

The Bishop felt blood trickle down his wrists, as his nails cut into the flesh of his palms, his fists were clenched so tightly. The Captain had played him like a fiddle and he wanted to strangle and kiss her all at once.

***

And Hawthorne did the impossible.

She won.

What the cleverest minds of the Board, who had crafted the insidious systems that kept them in places of power and robbed their colonists of all their agency, had failed to foresee was that power is a trick of the light.

No colonists from Terra-2 obeyed the conscription order. Not from the Roseway or the Emerald Vale or Byzantium. The Board had the resources, the superior weapons, armor, vehicles, and the funding to carry out a devastating campaign… but they did not have the bodies.

The combined forces of MSI, the Iconoclasts, Groundbreaker, and the independent townships that had thrived on Monarch, outnumbered and eventually outlasted the security and guard units of the Board.

When Hawthorne’s fleet arrived on Byzantium expecting to stage their final assault, instead she found herself walking through abandoned streets. The elite who were intelligent enough to know which way the wind was blowing had holed themselves up in their manses, or fled. There was no one left to fight.

Captain Hawthorne strode into the headquarters of the Halcyon Holdings Corporation and Adjutant Akande was waiting for her, having already drafted a document with the terms of surrender.

Zora Blackwood and her Iconoclasts had raided the Church of the Scientific Order. She reported to Hawthorne later that the Bishop had refused to go peacefully, and that it had taken a dozen of her soldiers to finally detain him. Hawthorne had smirked when she heard the report.

The upper management of the corporation and the directors of the Board were all arrested and told they were to stand trial. Hawthorne wanted a bloodless revolution and insisted on no deaths, though they found Chairman Rockwell lifeless in his office. Ellie later determined he had swallowed a jar of poison capsules.

The Bishop found himself back inside of a cell in Tartarus, to await his trial and sentencing. He found he spent many hours in silent contemplation, obsessive questions circling over and over in his mind of what cruel irony the Architect possessed that he found himself in this same place in the Universal Equation all over again.

And he wondered if Hawthorne had been right. That all those years ago inside of a hermit’s hut on Scylla, he had been confronted with the fact that the Architect, the Grand Plan, his predetermined fate were just lies… comforting fictions… and his life would have been very different if he had accepted the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it wasn't clear, this is set in a timeline where Zora Blackwood was given leadership of the Iconoclasts (because I think Zora and Sanjar working together is the absolute best and y'all can fight me if you want)
> 
> After this, there is just a short epilogue and I'll throw it up immediately because it's just not worth dragging the end of this story out, but I wanted a break for formatting reasons.


	2. Chapter 2

“We’ll give it a few minutes, give the drugs a chance to distribute fully through your circulatory system. It’s what will keep all of your blood vessels from bursting once you go into cryo.”

“How generous of you,” Max muttered, rubbing his arms as the medical technician had instructed.

She smirked at his snarky tone as she finished her notes on his chart. Max looked around the cryo chamber of the Hope and felt spooked. There were cryo pods lined up in neat rows, further than he could see, and hundreds were already occupied.

That had been his fate. Hawthorne had wanted no executions. But anyone who had been determined as not having the skills, knowledge or ability that was directly helpful in solving the problem of starvation for the colony, was being frozen until Halcyon could sustain its full population again.

And they had no use for a priest.

Max wondered if Hawthorne could appreciate the irony that she was implementing Rockwell’s Lifetime Employment Program, although correctly.

He paced around, he had been instructed to move to encourage blood flow to all of his limbs, when he heard footsteps come down the gang walk and looked up to see Hawthorne herself striding over. His heart leapt and he silently scolded the part of him that had hoped to see her before he went under.

“Let me guess – you’ve changed your mind and you need my expertise after all?”

She smirked and waved her finger at him. “Ah, ah, it’s not up to me. We’re trying that whole ‘community-driven governance’ thing, you know. And a committee decided to put you on ice. Nothing I can do to change that.”

“Pity.”

He looked at her, his traitorous eyes slipping down to her lips, and he decided that he wouldn’t admonish himself for feeling hopeful. He had gone to literal war against this woman, and yet there was still a familiarity between them that was so deep and aching, they came back together again and again.

He pulled her in and kissed her. Hard.

“Well, that’s one way to get your heart rate going,” the medical technician commented wryly.

When he broke apart, he saw a pleased but confused smile on Hawthorne’s face. “What was that?”

“Goodbye? I don’t think I’ll ever see you again. I actually think I’ll never get fucking thawed and being frozen isn’t how I imagined my death, but – isn’t that why you’re here?” His brow knit in confusion. “To say goodbye to me?”

Hawthorne laughed, shaking her head. “No, I’ve been assigned here too. We’re neighbors, actually.”

“What?”

Hawthorne jerked a thumb to the cryo chamber behind her. It was directly in front of the one designated to Max. He examined her chamber in confusion, looking at the patient chart that was attached to it.

“But your name isn’t on here…”

It hit him like a soft blow. ‘Alex Hawthorne’ was not written on the chart, but another name was. Her real name. Half of it he had called out to her in their most private moments. A name that she was reclaiming.

“Why are they doing this to you?” He began to feel angry. “After everything you’ve done for them? You literally led their fucking revolution!”

“Max, I _volunteered_.” She smoothed a strand of his hair and he felt a delicious shiver run up and down his spine. “I was the Captain they needed for a war. But in a time of rebuilding… There’s no use for an adventurer like me.”

His chest felt tight. She was so fucking noble in spite of it all, and it made him angry and proud all at once. “Let’s agree to disagree.”

“Flatterer,” she smiled and then pulled him in and held him tightly in her arms, burying her face into his neck. She whispered, “I think we were destined to be enemies in this lifetime… but maybe in the next, we can be something different.”

He had never heard something he wanted more in his life. He trembled in her arms and she pulled back a little so she could look at his face.

“Are you nervous?”

He nodded, deciding not to pretend. “Of course I’m nervous. I’ve never been fucking frozen before. What if something goes wrong? What if I never wake up? What if I do and… everything will be different.”

“This is my second time going around, so take it from me. It _will_ be different. And I’m looking forward to it.”

Her smile brought one of his own to his lips.

When they were placed inside their cryo chambers and strapped in, Max had to take deep, shaky breaths to stay calm. He looked over and saw her warm eyes staring back, encouraging him, and it made him brave enough to lie back as the chamber sealed shut with a _hiss_ and began to fill up with smoky plumes of coolant.

A breath escaped between his teeth, already feeling chilled. He was growing sleepy, finding it harder to keep his eyes open. He kept them trained on her face in front of him until he succumbed to the sedative.

He slipped into darkness, hopeful, that the next time he opened his eyes, they would wake up together in a new world, with a fresh start.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gang. We did it.
> 
> Every single one of you who has read, kudos-ed, commented -- you have no idea what it means to me. This has really become the little fandom that could. When I started writing this series, there was around 120 fics in this category. As of posting, there is now almost 220. I used to write fic a long time ago (under different pseuds), and because I always liked that obscure thing or that rarepair, I was mostly writing for myself in a little void. Which is fine, but also lonely. Getting a sense of community and feedback with this dumb series has filled my heart in ways you can't imagine. I've also begun and abandoned epic length series (like 50k+) multiple times and I promised myself I wouldn't do that here. And so it feels huge to me that we made it to the end without abandoning, because this arc and this ending was planned right from the beginning, and it feels so good to have made it here.
> 
> This was a BLAST to do, and some of you guys have commented that I wrote fast, well, knowing that people appreciated and were excited to see where this went lit a fire under my arse. I'm kind of sad it's done! I don't know what's coming next or if I'll write any more, but never say never. If you liked this Captain, she does feature in the very first TOW fic I posted which is set in a different Board timeline. And if you want to see Max and Felix bicker over tossball, I did write a short stand-alone for the City and Stars exchange (which I hope they'll keep doing!)
> 
> Thank you, guys. Hope I catch you on the next one ;)


End file.
